Nate Cavanaugh dropped out of IU in 2015.
Now, he’s in charge of a federally funded institution meant to promote peace. And on top of that, he’s a staffer in billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative of President Donald Trump’s second administration that's slashed federal agencies and thousands of jobs.
Lawyers representing the U.S. Institute of Peace, a Congress-funded nonpartisan organization intended to prevent violence abroad, asked a U.S. district court judge Monday to halt the transfer of its property to the General Services Administration. That judge, Beryl Howell, denied the motion Tuesday.
Documents show Cavanaugh was installed by top cabinet officials as president of USIP, as of March 25.
According to reports, Cavanaugh is 28 years old. He was featured in Forbes’ 2021 “30 Under 30” for enterprise technology. Cavanaugh’s profile on that list states he founded the company Brainbase from his IU dormitory before dropping out. He wrote on LinkedIn he attended IU from 2014-15.
A 2017 Medium article from Cavanaugh describes Brainbase as an intellectual property and trademark licensing management tool. The 2021 Forbes profile claimed the company had raised $12 million. Now, the original Brainbase website has gone dark, and the company seems to have been bought out. A different site, usebrainbase.com, promotes artificial intelligence workers for companies.
According to his LinkedIn, Cavanaugh left Brainbase in November 2022, but he is also the co-founder of FlowFi, which connects businesses with financial experts, according to its website. But photos of what it claims are experts appear to be AI-generated images. These images have a “glossy” look characteristic of AI photos, and reverse image searches for several yielded no results online. One reverse image search found one photo is an Adobe stock AI image.
Cavanaugh joined DOGE at some point following Trump’s executive order establishing it in January. WIRED reported last month he’d taken a role interviewing U.S. General Service Administration employees and earning a salary of $120,500 per year. That’s just shy of what DOGE says is the average annual salary of workers at GSA, $128,000.
The motion filed Monday includes a photo that shows an undated resolution signed by U.S. Secretaries of Defense and State Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio removing the U.S. Institute for Peace’s acting president Kenneth Jackson and replacing him with Cavanaugh. Jackson himself is part of DOGE. Last month, he and other DOGE members were part of a standoff with USIP staff outside the building, ultimately gaining entry with the help of police.
Hegseth and Rubio are both on USIP’s board of directors. It also directed Cavanaugh to transfer all of the institute’s assets, including its building, to GSA. Cavanaugh wrote in a letter to the GSA administrator, also attached to the motion, that the building has an estimated fair market value of $500 million.
Russell Vought, U.S. Office of Management and Budget director and Project 2025 co-author, approved the building transfer at no cost in a March 29 letter.
The move comes amid DOGE firing nearly all of USIP’s staff in recent days. The institute promotes research, policy analysis and education on conflict resolution, according to the Federal Register.
